Miliband has youth on side but needs to earn green stripes

David Miliband has been handed the high-profile environment brief as a political move to counter the Conservatives' recent hijacking of the mainstream green agenda. He may not have the charisma or the means of David Cameron and his adviser Zac Goldsmith, but at 40, he is from a generation that learned about environmental change at school rather than a civil servant brief digested on the way to a meeting.

This marks a massive change for the party which, at its highest levels, has never grasped the personal appeal or political potential of a green agenda. Labour's old guard has always linked the environment to old-style containment politics, such as agriculture or planning, rather than the new international agenda or youth and human rights.

Indeed, the average age of Labour environment secretaries appointed by Tony Blair has been almost 60 and they have treated the environment portfolio as the end of their political journey.

Mr Miliband is near the start of his, and with both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats competing to make the brief central to their future political thinking, he should be able to meet them head-on. He skips a political generation and, Labour hopes, could give the party the personal engagement that was completely missing under Jack Cunningham and John Prescott and has been, though to a lesser extent, also absent under Margaret Beckett.

He is also a thinker who has boned up on urban philosophy, climate change and decentralisation. But he may have to convince people he is a defender of green values. As a junior minister in John Prescott's department, he barely questioned the savaging of the rural environment under Office of the Deputy Prime Minister housebuilding plans; showed himself ecologically illiterate in pushing for Thames gateway developments; and has failed to convince Labour that local government can be trusted.

Now he will need to be a bruiser to persuade Mr Blair that the environment is not a bolt-on optional extra and that cutting climate change emissions is more than just making the odd speech or two. His new department has been practically at war with the Treasury over funding, and is constantly skirmishing with the Department for Transport over aviation and roads, and the Department of Trade and Industry over everything. In the next six months he will have to grapple with nuclear power, Britain's farmers, and powerful green groups that have fallen out of love with Labour.